Here's one approach -
- Use STDIN and STDOUT for input and output
- Use a regex to extract the first 'column'. You could also use split, but since you care only about the first column it may be overkill.
- Use a hash to gather unique filenames
Put it all together and you will have something like this:
# uniqfiles.pl
use strict; # helps prevent silly mistakes
use warnings; # helpful when writing code
while (<>) { # Reads from STDIN
if (/^(\w+)\t/) { # If the line starts with one or more 'word' char
+acters followed by a tab...
my $filename = $1; # ...assume we've got a filename captured
$uniq_fnames{$filename} = 1; # ...and add it to our hash.
}
}
print $_,"\n" for keys %uniq_fnames; # prints to STDOUT, can be piped
+ to a file
Then you could use this as follows
perl uniqfiles.pl < my_non_unique_list_of_files > my_unique_list_of_fi
+les